“There’re probably “good” ETF’s and “bad” ones that are easier & harder to manipulate, but while fudging an individual stock is hard enough, the fear of someone fudging an entire stock sector block kind of makes me want to reach for the tin-foil. I use index funds (SPY - S&P500, QQQ - NASDAQ, and IWM for the Russell 2K) and am always checking.”
The bigger and long in the tooth ETF’s like the ones you mentioned are hard to manipulate.
The smaller ones could be manipulated by a big hedge fund or $ore$$ or Buffett.
“Like you said, sell rules are key, though many of us have been disappointed w/ automatic stop-loss limit orders in favor of simply watching for sell-times.”
I’m a fairly lucky guy until it comes to picking sell-times or what checkout line to get into. I never pick the right time to sell or the best checkout line. When I used to buy ETF as investments instead of safer investments with regular dividends, I would set up an auto sell order when the ETF went over a certain % gain from 10% to 15%. That worked well during the Clintoon years until the bottom fell out. Then, our stop loss sale orders saved our butts when the dot.com fantasy/wet dream world collapsed. That event drove me to the lower risk and dividend paying ETF’s.
W/ all the pundit buzz about which stock to buy and which way the market’s going, everyone seems to forget the most important part: good sell rules. I’m much more pleased by how great my sales go than how my buys are went.